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      BACKGROUND

      Research and practice at the Center for Creative Leadership strongly support three key conclusions about leader development:

      • Effective leaders continue to develop their repertoire of skills throughout their careers. Most leaders begin their careers with clear strengths that they bring to their work. These strengths vary from leader to leader; possibilities include ease at building productive relationships, the ability to synthesize and create order out of a large amount of information, and resiliency in the face of adversity. But to be effective in a wide variety of leadership roles and situations, individuals have to master new skills and develop proficiency in additional arenas. Instead of always relying on a limited set of natural capabilities, they have to become more well-rounded. This development of a repertoire of skills is a gradual, continuous process—although there may be periods when leaders experience a sense of more rapid learning. It is also important to remember that no single leader becomes adept at all the myriad skills that can be applied to leadership work. The important point is that effective leaders—whatever their beginning base of strength—work to broaden their repertoire.

      • A significant part of this development occurs through practical experiences. Effective leaders who have been on this journey report work and life experiences as a rich source of their ongoing learning and growth. This is consistent with what we know about adult learning. Adults learn when their day-to-day responsibilities and challenges require it—and when they have the opportunity to engage in experiences, draw lessons and insights from those experiences, and apply this new knowledge and skills to the next experience. Leaders also learn from formal training and development activities and through their relationships, but “learning by doing” is a central process in leader development.

      • The more varied the practical experiences, the greater the likelihood of developing a broad repertoire of skills. Leaders who continue to focus only on doing the work that they are already good at are less likely to broaden their leadership capacity. Leaders who step into new situations and face challenges that call for untested abilities continue to develop their capacity and successfully take on higher levels of leadership responsibility. Certainly, these leaders apply their strengths to their “stretch” experiences, but they also are aware that these experiences ignite their “growing edge,” where deeper knowledge is discovered and new capabilities are honed.

      These conclusions lead to the advice we give to leaders about their own development: shape your work and life experiences so that they will provide the opportunities to expand your leadership knowledge and skills. As you will see in the descriptions that follow, the paths to these practical learning experiences are varied.

       Descriptions of Development in Place

      Sometimes developmental assignments are thrust upon people, as in these examples from two leaders:

      I was a manager in an accounting firm, and a large commercial bank was about to terminate us because of poor service. I was assigned to save the office’s largest client. This difficult challenge required selecting the right staff, negotiating the services with the client, and ensuring top-quality work. The end result was that the bank stayed and we were able to receive significant add-on services. I learned what great teamwork takes—including making the customer part of the team.

      While assigned as an industrial engineer at my first overseas post, I was given a special assignment in production control to improve the effectiveness of production scheduling. I possessed no previous experience in scheduling, had to deal in a foreign language that I was just learning, and was trying to figure out what scheduling meant in a culture that did not value speed and efficiency in ways that I did. I gained a lot of confidence from this experience. I realized that I could learn the language and the techniques of a whole new area quickly and make a contribution.

      At other times, people choose to pursue a task or activity that’s not a normal part of their work primarily because the activity has potential value for the organization (or some larger cause). They expect the experience to be developmental, but they haven’t chosen the activity for that reason. As can be seen in the next two examples, these assignments can be inside or outside the work setting.

      I saw a great new business opportunity for my division and pursued it. It involved extensive strategic and financial analysis, formal recommendation to corporate, acquisition of a small company, and integration into our division. The outcome was good for the organization and for me. I learned to integrate a great deal of data, improved my negotiation skills, and impressed my boss enough to get a promotion.

      I went with a church group to Mexico to build an addition to a small school. I didn’t know any of the people on the team. We had to quickly learn how to work together. Some of us had more building expertise than others, but we discovered that everyone had a strength to contribute to the work. This was important because it was hard work! I learned about the power of a unifying set of values for motivating diverse people to contribute to a team.

      And finally, individuals also pursue developmental assignments intentionally, either because their current jobs aren’t providing enough development or they are targeting a particular development need.

      One of my colleagues and I were grumbling about the fact that we felt we were getting stale in our jobs. We hit upon the idea of trading off a couple of our projects. She was in marketing research, and I was in public relations. We sold this to our bosses as on-the-job development. We both learned about a function we had little exposure to. One mistake we made was not selling this switch to the other people on the projects. I encountered some subtle resistance that took me a while to pick up on. But the project team and I ended up having a straightforward conversation. I learned that they thought this project was just a “playground” for me. I reassured them and continued demonstrating my commitment to the work. I learned to put myself in other people’s shoes and see how things must look from their perspective.

      My boss and I agreed that I tend to shy away from problems that require a lot of cross-functional input and have political ramifications. As part of my development plan, he put me in charge of investigating and bringing back recommendations about the potential outsourcing of three business services. This forced me to work with some other functions in a politically charged atmosphere—although my boss continued to support and coach me throughout. I learned that if you provide enough useful information and set the right tone, people can make good decisions that balance multiple criteria.

      What these examples have in common is that the developmental assignment did not require taking on a whole new job. And the assignment challenged the individuals, stretching them beyond their current skills. Challenge is one of the key elements of a developmental assignment. But the examples also highlight the wide variety of challenges a leader might face in an assignment. What might be the right challenge for you as you continue to expand your repertoire of leadership skills? The job challenge framework can help you start to answer that question.

       Job Challenges

      The job challenge framework helps individuals identify developmental assignments. It is based on a series of research projects on managerial learning, growth, and change. These studies clearly pointed to the central role played by job assignments in the development of successful leaders. The research identifies a number of key challenges—characteristics or features of assignments that stimulate learning:

      • Unfamiliar

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